JDK 17 - What's new features in Java 17

Java 17 is a feature release that will obsolete Java 16 and was Java's long-term support (LTS) update. Java 17 release date : September 2021

Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where it describes a software edition that is supported for months or years longer than the software's standard edition.

Java 17 is still to be built, take a look at the latest Java version: Java 15 functionality and the next upcoming Java 16 functionality upgrade to get an idea of what will be in JDK 17

Quick glance on earlier Java Versions Features :

Java 16 Features - JDK 16

Below are proposed features coming out as part of the JDK 16 :

1. JEP 338: Vector API (Incubator)
2. JEP 347: Enable C++14 Language Features
3. JEP 357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git
4. JEP 369: Migrate to GitHub
5. JEP 376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing
6. 386: Alpine Linux Port
7. JEP 387: Elastic Metaspace
8. JEP 388: Windows/AArch64 Port

Java 15 Features - JDK 15

1. JEP 339: Edwards-Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA)
2. JEP 360: Sealed Classes (Preview)
3. JEP 371: Hidden Classes
4. JEP 372: Remove the Nashorn JavaScript Engine
5. JEP 374: Disable and Deprecate Biased Locking
6. JEP 375: Pattern Matching for instanceof (Second Preview)
7. JEP 377: ZGC: A Scalable Low-Latency Garbage Collector
8. JEP 378: Text Blocks
9. JEP 379: Shenandoah: A Low-Pause-Time Garbage Collector
10. JEP 381: Remove the Solaris and SPARC Ports
11. JEP 383: Foreign-Memory Access API (Second Incubator)
12. JEP 384: Records (Second Preview)
13. JEP 385: Deprecate RMI Activation for Removal

Java 14 Features - JDK 14

1. Pattern Matching for instanceof
2. Non-Volatile Mapped Byte Buffers
3. Helpful NullPointerExceptions
4. Switch Expressions (Standard)
5. Packaging Tool (Incubator)
6. NUMA-Aware Memory Allocation for G1
7. JFR Event Streaming
8. Records (Preview)
9. Deprecate the Solaris and SPARC Ports
10. Remove the Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) Garbage Collector
11. ZGC on macOS
12. ZGC on Windows
13. Deprecate the ParallelScavenge + SerialOld GC Combination
14. Remove the Pack200 Tools and API
15. Text Blocks (Second Preview)
16. Foreign-Memory Access API

Java 13 Features - JDK 13

• Dynamic CDS Archives
• ZGC: Uncommit Unused Memory
• Reimplement the Legacy Socket API
• Switch Expressions (Preview)
• Text Blocks (Preview)

Java 12 Features

• Shenandoah: A Low-Pause-Time Garbage Collector (Experimental)
• Microbenchmark Suite
• Switch Expressions (Preview)
• JVM Constants API
• One AArch64 Port, Not Two
• Default CDS Archives
• Abortable Mixed Collections
• Promptly Return Unused Committed Memory from G1

Java 11 Features

• 181: Nest-Based Access Control
• 309: Dynamic Class-File Constants
• 315: Improve Aarch64 Intrinsics
• 318: Epsilon: A No-Op Garbage Collector
• 320: Remove the Java EE and CORBA Modules
• 321: HTTP Client (Standard)
• 323: Local-Variable Syntax for Lambda Parameters
• 324: Key Agreement with Curve25519 and Curve448
• 327: Unicode 10
• 328: Flight Recorder
• 329: ChaCha20 and Poly1305 Cryptographic Algorithms
• 330: Launch Single-File Source-Code Programs
• 331: Low-Overhead Heap Profiling
• 332: Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3
• 333: ZGC: A Scalable Low-Latency Garbage Collector(Experimental)
• 335: Deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript Engine
• 336: Deprecate the Pack200 Tools and API

Java 10 Features

• Local-variable type inference
• Experimental Java-based JIT compiler.This is the integration of the Graal dynamic compiler for the Linux x64 platform
• Application class-data sharing. This allows application classes to be placed in the shared archive to reduce startup and footprint for Java applications
• Time-based release versioning
• Parallel full GC
• Garbage-collector interface
• Additional Unicode language-tag extensions
• Root certificates
• Thread-local handshakes
• Heap allocation on alternative memory devices
• Remove the native-header generation tool - javah
• Consolidate the JDK forest into a single repository

Java 9 Features

• Modularization of the JDK under Project Jigsaw (Java Platform Module System)
• jshell: The Java Shell (a Java REPL)
• Ahead-of-time compilation
• XML catalogs
• More concurrency updates. It includes a Java implementation of Reactive Streams, including a new Flow class that included the interfaces previously provided by Reactive Streams
• Variable handles: define a standard means to invoke the equivalents of various java.util.concurrent.atomic and sun.misc.Unsafe operations
• jlink: The Java Linker: create a tool that can assemble and optimize a set of modules and their dependencies into a custom run-time image. It effectively allows to produce a fully usable executable including the JVM to run it
• JavaDB was removed from JDK
• HiDPI graphics: automatic scaling and sizing

Java 8 Features

• Language-level support for lambda expressions and default methods (virtual extension methods) which allow the addition of methods to interfaces without breaking existing implementations.
• Project Nashorn, a JavaScript runtime which allows developers to embed JavaScript code within applications
• Annotation on Java types
• Unsigned integer arithmetic
• Repeating annotations
• Date and time API
• Statically-linked JNI libraries
• Launch JavaFX applications (direct launching of JavaFX application JARs)
• Remove the permanent generation

Java 7 Features

• JVM support for dynamic languages
• Compressed 64-bit pointers
• Strings in switch
• Automatic resource management in try-statement
• Improved type inference for generic instance creation, aka the diamond operator <>
• Simplified varargs method declaration
• Binary integer literals
• Allowing underscores in numeric literals
• Catching multiple exception types and rethrowing exceptions with improved type checking
• Concurrency utilities
• New file I/O library adding support for multiple file systems
• Timsort is used to sort collections and arrays of objects instead of merge sort
• Library-level support for elliptic curve cryptography algorithms
• An XRender pipeline for Java 2D, which improves handling of features specific to modern GPUs
• New platform APIs for the graphics features
• Enhanced library-level support for new network protocols, including SCTP and Sockets Direct Protocol
• Upstream updates to XML and Unicode
• Java deployment rule sets

Java 6 Features

• Support for older Win9x versions dropped
• Scripting Language Support
• Dramatic performance improvements for the core platform, and Swing.
• Improved Web Service support through JAX-WS.
• JDBC 4.0 support.
• Java Compiler API
• Upgrade of JAXB to version 2.0
• Support for pluggable annotations
• Many GUI improvements, such as integration of SwingWorker in the API, table sorting and filtering, and true Swing double-buffering (eliminating the gray-area effect).
• JVM improvements include: synchronization and compiler performance optimizations, new algorithms and upgrades to existing garbage collection algorithms, and application start-up performance.
• Java 6 can be installed to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) running on 64-bit (Core 2 Duo and higher) processor machines.[54] Java 6 is also supported by both 32-bit and 64-bit machines running Mac OS X 10.6

Java 5 Features

• Generic
• Metadata
• Autoboxing/unboxing
• Enumerations
• Varargs
• Enhanced for each loop
• Improved
• Static imports
• Improvements - Semantics of execution for multi-threaded Java programs
• Improvements - Automatic stub generation for RMI objects
• Improvements - Swing: New skinnable look and feel, called synth
• Improvements - The concurrency utilities in package java.util.concurrent
• Improvements - Scanner class for parsing data from various input streams and buffers